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The ID types used throughout the OME-XML model are designed to support
identifiers in two forms. Where possible, the full LSID
format should be used. If an LSID resolver is unavailable, an internal-only
form may be used.

An LSID is a Life Science Identifier. It is a Uniform Resource Name
standard, designed to allow the unique identifying of life sciences
resources across the World Wide Web in line with the Semantic Web
concept. It was designed to allow the naming or identifying of data and
associated metadata that can be stored in multiple, distributed data
stores.

The uniqueID can be any non-whitespace characters. The domain-name is
any standard character (including Unicode) with dash and dot. It must
contain at least one dot. The version block is not required but will be
accepted if present.

The LSID specification defines the first three portions as
‘’‘case-insensitive’‘’, that is URN:LSID:<Authority>. The remaining
portion is ‘’‘case-sensitive’‘’. In OME-XML however, we assume ‘’‘lower
case’‘’ for the first two portions urn:lsid, for <domain-name>
any case is acceptable but lower case is recommended for consistency.
The remaining portion is case-sensitive.

The shorter internal only form is:

<element-name>:<uniqueID>

The formats are enforced by the regular expressions defined in the
schema document e.g. a sample regular expression for a Project ID is

(urn:lsid:([\w-\.]+\.[\w-\.]+)+:Project:\S+)|(Project:\S+)

Note

The regex parser in XSD is slightly non standard and assumes that
the pattern is always meant to start at the beginning of the line and
finish at the end of the line, this means that !^ and $ are not
necessary.

The simple regular expressions used provide a first level of validation
but it is possible to produce an invalid LSID that will be accepted by
the regex. As a tradeoff between complexity and usability, the
domain-name check is quite lax e.g. it will accept www.ome-xml..org as
valid despite the double dot.